Episode description

Hello friends, welcome back to the Attention Audit podcast! This week we are going to dive into outsourcing. As a whole, this is something that I wholeheartedly believe in, and I’m always scanning and looking for new opportunities on where I can outsource, not only in my business, but also in my personal life.

So in this week’s episode, I’m going to walk you through how to start outsourcing using a checklist because I know how daunting it can be to simply get started. This is also something that we are covering in my midyear reset mastermind coming up and I’m so excited about it because we are going to take one area of the business and each of our own businesses and identify what we can outsource starting with what are the things that I no longer have the energy to do.

Start with a task that drained your energy and look for an underlying process. Look for the things that you find yourself thinking ‘oh my gosh I just don’t want to do this’ on a regular basis and start there. The goal here is to create a process so we can train someone to follow that process. It could be something as simple as checking and organizing emails. The person you hire can only go so far in terms of organization unless you hire someone specifically known to be really good at that task and has an established system, more likely than not however, you’re going to be hiring someone who is a generalist, and they will need a bit more direction. You can provide that direction through creating the process for them to follow because when there is a process, we can coach that process, we can train that process, and it makes it really easy for someone to plug up themselves into that process.

Take email, for example. Let’s say you typically check your emails in the morning and then again in the evening and you file certain things in different blocks. Maybe you have different email types that come in such as inquiries, speaking engagements, customer service, emails, etc. Really be specific about the different types of emails that come into your inbox and identify themes or categories of those that you can drop into particular buckets. The more specific you can be here, the simpler the training will be later on.

Once you list out all of the tasks and start breaking them into categories then refine those processes. At this point when it comes to refining, the processes step three is that you were going to look for template opportunities. What I mean by identifying template opportunities is a simple as creating a Google email template that you can rinse and repeat using for each of those email categories.

Step four is to choose a place that is centralized where you can map out and store your entire training process. It could be somewhere such as your Google Drive. You’re going to take all of those processes and templates that you’ve created, get them into one document, and store them where they will ‘live’.

Step five is a step that I often see people miss but it’s super important because it takes into account that everyone learns differently. Some people learn visually, some people learn by listening, some people learn tactfully, everyone is different. I know I personally learn by hearing and visually seeing steps. So this is where I want you to use a tool, such as Loom to record yourself doing the actual task. This will help to eliminate a lot of questions or steps that can easily get lost in translation, because the person can see it happen on real time which will also reduce the amount of back-and-forth.

All of these can be easily applied to tasks that you’re looking to outsource not only in your business, but in your personal life as well. 

That’s all I have for you in this weeks episode. Come hang out with me on Instagram @attentionaudit and I look forward to chatting with you next week. Until then, take care.